Each side claims it is wronged more and harmed worse. One community, the Kuki, is forced to prove its Indianness and patriotism. The other, the Meitei, is forced to hide its unease and let advocates mumble about its umbilical relation with the mainland’s Hinduism, even if it at times requires the community to be falsely associated with the delusional persecution of Hindutva….

Nitin Sethi

Mourning the loss of more than a hundred dead and thousands displaced, Kuki and Meitei people, the two communities at loggerheads in Manipur, have been forced to parade their losses to an ignorant rest of India. And to a Union government that pretends in public to be uninformed and unfazed.

Within Manipur, the armed groups of both communities, the political and civil society leaders, and two societies that live a legitimate mix of anger, fear and anxiety, battle it out. Both sides rightly believe the State is not there to fend for them. And that it is too pulverised by the politics of those who run the State to focus on speedily drawing the societies back from the conflict.

They all know that the license to impose violence has never been the exclusive domain of the State in Manipur – armed groups of many shades and vintage have always shared that license with the government. In fact, the State has actively distributed that license to some in order to break the monopoly of others. In this game of crafting a nation-state, of continuous negotiations over the strategic distribution of the right to commit violence, the State’s own armed agencies have always been perceived as players and contestants, not neutral umpires that impose peace.

Both communities have known these truths for generations. The rest of India has always preferred not to acknowledge Manipur’s age-old truths. Acknowledging them means accepting with shame that some geographical locations in India are governed by Constitution lite.  

Neither charged community’s advocates have the time or desire to set the record straight right now. It’s wartime. This civil war is not to reset either community’s fundamental relation with the rest of the nation. It is to renegotiate the lines of control over the State’s several functions by the leaders of the two communities.

They renegotiate these lines knowing that the one which was supposed to be a peacemaking arbiter – the BJP in power over the Union and the State – has been foolish enough to try and convert its electoral dominance into its political and ideological hegemony, as academic Avinash Paliwal explains with better insights than most observers. (I desist from filling this space with a presentation of background or recanting the horrendous happenings, hoping readers will go to Paliwal’s and other writings to do so).

Communication warriors of both communities compete. Ranging from academics to newborn Twitter and Instagram soldiers located outside the battlegrounds, either mobilised or charged by the moment, they try to set a partiality-laced context of the civil war for the perplexed country….

https://www.outlookindia.com/national/a-durable-settlement-magazine-306745